45 Billion Minutes!

A few fun facts from an interesting, but not surprising, article from PC Magazine today that reports on some findings as a result of recent market research done by Nielsen Online:

One in every 11 minutes online globally is accounted for by social network and blogging sites, the group found, or 45 billion minutes in total.

Blogs and social networking are consuming more online time than checking and writing personal email.

A search engine was used by 85.9 percent of the world’s population, followed by what the firm called “general interest portals and communities,” such as Yahoo, with an 85.2 percent reach. Software ranked third at 73.4 percent, with the member communities of blogs and email fourth, at 66.8 percent. Email came in fifth, at 65.1 percent. All categories showed gains from the year before.

Facebook remained the most popular social-networking destination around the world, and user attention rocketed by 566 percent from a year ago.

As well, this article provides some interesting and quantifiable data about a trend that we have all been observing — the movement of “old fogies” to Facebook (see my previous post) is driving the original demographic to leave:

Growth in social networking is being driven not by the young, but by the middle-aged. The category of men and women aged 65 and above moving to social networking grew by 7 percent, Nielsen found, while the 2-17-year-old category dropped by 9 percent. The most popular age group with Facebook in terms of growth is the 35-49 category, which increased by 24.1 million people.

This article gives terrific insight in to the shift that occurring online and gives some great data to justify the addition of digital branches and social networking features to a library system. The reach of social networking is extending and, like email before it, is something that library patrons of all ages are becoming comfortable using.

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